Experience

Do You Have the Right Technologies to Personalize Customer Transactions?

In customer support today, personalization is becoming the pivot point on which customers base their approval or disapproval of an organization. Customers, weary of being asked who they are over and over again, only to be treated like the company has never heard of them (even if they’re good customers), are demanding that organizations pay attention to who they are, what they’ve asked for in the past, and what they’re likely to want in the future. This particularly applies to bank customers, who may have a great deal of money tied up with an organization.

“Consumers increasingly have come to expect personalized service from every organization to which they bring business,” wrote Michael Boukadakis of Enacomm in an article for Banking Technology. “The level of personalization that traditional customer segmentation offers is no longer enough; true one-to-one individualization is the best way for financial institutions to win and keep customers.”

Lumping customers in groups, rather than treating them as individuals, may be convenient for the customer support organization, but it’s certainly not going to impress customers. It’s data that underpins personalized customer support, and companies need to be collecting and interpreting as much data as they can to generate actionable intelligence that can help further the customer relationship. The side benefit is that this intelligence can then be used for predictive marketing. Customers today are bombarded with marketing messages; they’re only going to pay attention to the messages that are relevant to them.

A number of different technologies and services will go into personalizing the customer experience, and customer support organizations will have to build a network of them to provide the kind of one-of-a-kind experience customers expect. It will also require skillful use of big data, said Boukadakis.

“To make big data think, the latest CRM technology uses the information that is collected to proactively and intelligently interact with each customer in real time, in any communication channel,” he wrote. “In addition to demographics and account information, each customer’s behavior factors into the dynamic decisioning engine, allowing financial institutions to anticipate customers’ needs and predict their future behavior.”

Call quality monitoring and feedback programs can also help companies learn all they need to know about their customers. With so many channels available today to communicate, some companies are having a hard time maintaining the kind of quality that leads to personalization. Third-party remote call monitoring solutions providers such as BPA Quality can quality check each channel – telephone, email, chat and even social media, to be sure each communication is offering the kind of personalization customers expect. It can also make sure that they are asking the right questions to make the most of the information customers are offering in each transaction.

In an era of high customer expectations for personalization, you can’t leave it to chance that your support agents are delivering the right experience to your customers. Independent monitoring can ensure that your personalization campaign is being followed to the letter.